From the Laboratory to the Field and Back Again: Morningside Academy's 32 Years of Improving Students' Academic Performance

* ABOUT MORNINGSIDE ACADEMY Morningside Academy is a behaviorally based laboratory school (Dewey, 1990a, 1990b) that helps elementary and middle school students to catch up and get ahead. It was founded and is currently directed by Kent Johnson. Most of its students did not perform to their potential in their previous schools. Entering students typically score in the first and second quartiles on standardized achievement tests in reading, language, and mathematics. Some have diagnosed learning disabilities; others are labeled as having attention deficit disorder or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Some lag behind their peer group for no "diagnosed" reason. Students' IQs range from low average to well above average. A small percentage of students have poor relations with family members and friends, but most do not. Morningside is a school for children with academic behavior problems, not a school for children with social and interpersonal behavior problems. ELEMENTARY SCHOOL: FOUNDATIONS Morningside Academy's Foundations program offers a full day of foundational skills that include reading, writing, math, thinking, reasoning, and problem solving. Elementary school-aged students enroll in the Foundations program for one to three years or more to catch up to grade level. About half of our middle school-aged students--those who enter without these foundational skills and who require a full day of foundation skills to make a year's progress in school--also enroll in the Foundations program. Many Foundations students who catch up to grade level extend their stay to achieve beyond their grade level. Morningside Academy offers a money-back guarantee for progressing two years in one in the skill of greatest deficit. In 31 years, Morningside Academy has returned less than one percent of school-year tuition. At Morningside Academy, we construct behavioral repertoires to eliminate (a) deficient basic academic skills, such as reading, writing, and mathematics; (b) deficient learning skills, such as goal setting, listening, noticing, reasoning, thinking, studying, and organizing; and (c) deficient performance skills; that is, skills in performing tasks in a timely, accurate, and organized manner, without disrupting others or causing oneself undue grief. The Morningside program focuses upon these three key academic, learning, and performance repertoires to increase the intensity and explicitness of instruction. The model at Morningside is in direct contrast to compensatory models that teach children to sidestep their disabilities. Instead, at Morningside, we teach students to face their behavioral deficits head on. The Foundations academic program focuses on reading, writing, and mathematics, including the language, facts, skills, concepts, principles, problem solving, and organizational aspects of each. Literature, social studies, and science provide the content for teaching these foundations in the sense that students learn to read and write about passages from these content areas and learn to apply math facts and operations to problems that each may present. Each student participates in extensive entry assessments of academic, learning, and performance skills. Students with similar needs and goals are grouped together for instruction. However, groupings change repeatedly throughout the day as students move from reading to writing to mathematics. Groupings also change continuously throughout the school year as students make more or less progress than students in their current group. There is no hard-and-fast rule about when a student may move to a new group. Later in the article when we describe our assessment process, we'll return to this issue. The comprehensive reading program includes basic prerequisites such as print awareness, phonemic awareness through auditory blending and segmenting, and the alphabetic principle. Basic foundations in decoding are emphasized, including sound-symbol correspondence, textual blending and segmenting strategies, and reading fluency. …